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November 02, 2018

The Dark Night - Sarah Van Diest

“For a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you” Isaiah 54:8.

The dark night of the soul is the phrase running through my mind – the sense of the Light having left. An Absence is present. And perhaps that is the way to see what I cannot see: as if there is an obstruction confounding my senses and telling me God has vanished, when all along he remains. The starless night is the alternative, one where stars had only been imagined and never were real at all.

That is a dark night indeed and one I’ve wandered into for moments, or days, or do I dare admit, even longer? That is the night where God has never existed at all, where light is an illusion and only darkness is real – more like a black hole of the soul, that is.

Whatever it is, I fear I have been made thin. I had thought faith and perseverance would reap meatier stuff. Not that I have walked in perfect faith and all-resolute perseverance, but steadily and with good will. Entering such emptiness, entering such a sense of abandonment, at this point along the journey is, well …it is unexpected.

I still pray. I still incline my ear. I still read the words he gave us and play them over in my mind when the darkness is its greatest and envelops more than just my mind, but my heart, too. There is a torture in these moments and I still run to the only Father I’ve ever known to be faithfully present. But the room where he and I would meet feels empty now. His chair has grown cold.

At times my eyes, the ones that truly see, feel as if they are closing. It’s as if a sleep is overwhelming them. The call for rest entices them. They have strained to see in the dark night for so long and they are tired.

But the thought occurs to me just now that the dark night of the soul is to some degree a falsity. The feelings associated with it are not false, but the darkness itself perhaps is. The reasoning which leads me here is this: even if God has abandoned the soul, for whatever reason and for whatever period of time, I do not believe the soul to be inherently darkened, as some do. Some say we are born full of evil; sin embodies us before we breathe our first awkward breath. We are the personification of darkness, in the eyes of some, until we find the light and love of God. I do not believe that.

If what I believe about our natural state is true, that we are created in the Imago Dei, and therefore are “good,” or even on those days when I can hardly fathom the reality of a deity and my perspective on man is as humanistic as it comes, then how can I seriously entertain the idea that my soul offers no light? I cannot. Because even the humanistic perspective, with its ever-evolving, always promising bias, shines man in a good light.

The dark night of the soul at some point must surrender to light, even if it is the soul emitting its own.

A hardened heart? Is that the judgment pronounced on the pilgrim whose moon has been eclipsed and stars erased? Perhaps. But if that were the case, I would wonder what first occurred, the hardening or the darkening? We know God was silent for 400 years. The hardening may have preceded his silence for those who lived that generation, but what of the generations to follow? Could their hearts not have been won by his wooing ways, and light been given to their darkness? It seems darkness preceded their hardening, if hardened hearts truly depicted their state.

The painful moment when Jesus cried out in torment asking his father why, not if, he had forsaken him is certainly a dark night of the soul. There was an Absence present for our Savior that moment, and he felt it acutely. Setting all the world’s sin on my Savior’s shoulders does not a hardened heart make… at least to me. I do not pretend to understand this moment at all. I can give no account of what happened that satisfies me. But it was clearly a moment of agony.

A moment of abandonment.

A moment of rejection.

A moment of being utterly alone.

A moment of Absence.

If belonging (being loved) is our greatest and most congenital need, because I think it must be, then it makes sense that being alone can be the bitter poison we taste in those dark nights. Our Father has left us alone, or at least we feel he has, and if he made us, then how could the one who made us leave, unless we really are wholly worthless? Wholly unlovable?

Hope pours out the open window on nights like those, and cold replaces the space it once occupied.

How, then, is hope replenished? How does warmth enter again into the room, and with it, light? Does the Father simply decide to return? Does the soul’s furnace suddenly ignite the cold ash with its small flame? How does the dark night of the soul end?

The answer that keeps finding me at night when I’m halfway between wakefulness and sleep is Grace. And I mean that in all seriousness. At night, when the day’s thoughts are working their way through my subconscious and thought is happening as if on its own, Grace is what enters my thinking. It enters as a new character in a novel enters a room. Its presence is first felt and then seen. The characters were fully engaged in their conversation and the interworkings of their relationships when someone unexpected walks into the room. Grace walks in and all take notice.

Grace takes many forms, and some might offer a different name. Some might simply call Grace Love, or Hope. It almost doesn’t matter, I suppose, because the point seems to be that this is a Presence at the time of an Absence. This is an entering at a time of a leaving. So here, in this way, Grace may also take on the form of Faith. Faith sees beyond what is evidenced and acts, at times, as a bridge between what was and what is to come. It undergirds the pilgrim when his legs are weak or the path has been lost. Or in the case of the dark night of the soul, Faith enters as the candle bearer until the light source returns or is found again.

God has many names, but the one echoing in my mind these days is Emmanuel, God with us. Here is where I stumble in the darkness. Here is where a sense of worthlessness is felt. If God is “with us” then why did he leave? I must not be counted worthy of his presence, is the ugly reply. The dark night of the soul has authority over us and our understanding because it finds us at our most vulnerable places and our most vulnerable times. It wraps one lie around another and we swallow them together, rarely asking if this is truth or fiction, only feeling the emptiness of abandonment.

The entrance of Grace, or Love, or Hope, or perhaps Emmanuel, comes as a surprise. If unworthiness is the state of being then any good company is unexpected.

If Absence is what predicated worthlessness, it is a reasonable question to ask if Absence created worthlessness or merely triggered it. The difference, at least in my mind, is crucial. If Absence of the Most High created a sense of worthlessness then the next question would be why? and that would be followed by something rather unpalatable and even seditious. It would perhaps mean that the Creator of all caused the pain to then come and be Comfort.

If one ascribes to the notion that God is an angry god who somehow appeased his own wrath by the sacrifice of his son, then perhaps that story fits. But I do not ascribe to that notion and so it does not fit. Therefore I must conclude, to be consistent with my own beliefs, that the Absence merely triggered what already existed within me.

Asking why God would trigger such a thing seems a good next step, and the answer I find is much more fitting with whom I believe him to be. The God I claim to know is a God of refinement, redemption, and restoration. His is a refining fire. If walking away from me, though that may merely be my sense and not reality, is what causes the false beliefs about myself to rise to the surface where Grace can affect them, amend them, restore them to truth, how can I then say he left me? I must then see that God is at work, lovingly ridding my soul of a dark shadow.

There are many of notoriety who have walked through their own dark nights of the soul. C.S. Lewis, St. John of the Cross, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther are four of whom I am aware. It seems that Lewis walked through darkness more than once, questioning Christianity and the character of God along the way, and coming out each time by the simplicity of small joys entering his life. Joy entered where Absence had made a home.

St. John of the Cross worked his way through such dark nights by way of, at least in my opinion, Faith. His belief in the character of God guided him through the darkness where he submitted to the refining work of Emmanuel leading him to a greater union with God. Comprehending that both senses and reasoning are unreliable and fail to grasp the fullness of God and choosing instead to rely on the “Awesome Unknown,” so choosing faith, is what moved him through his dark night.

Mother Teresa died in the darkness. The Absence was present most of her years. I do not know how she endured it all, except that she came to see it as a way to empathize with the abandoned and rejected to whom she ministered. Loneliness and rejection, she believed, were more horrific, terrible, and torturous than any disease or life circumstance. Her darkness, her sense of abandonment from the Father, became the light on her path to loving the dismissed and discarded.

Luther was unconventional in some of his ways of dealing with the darkness advising we, “Sin boldly!” when darkness sought to undo us. The Absence brought him to the edge of death, which is likely why he flailed about so desperately trying to abate it. In the end he stated: “Do not be worried; indeed such a trial is the very best sign of God’s grace and love for man,” seeing these dark nights as that which drives a soul to seek the saving power of God.

Each of these fellow pilgrims found moments where they wondered, if not outright believed, that God had left them or that he never existed to begin with. These were people whose spiritual lives were deeply meaningful aspects of who they were. God was essential to the description of their personhood. For them to have lost a connection with God was devastating.

I describe my own dark night, my own experiences of God’s Absence, as having to do with the complete worthlessness with which I view myself, and therefore questioning the character of God who made me. The sense that God has abandoned me resonates with and supports my belief of my worthlessness, but not my theology which says all created by God are of great value and that he promised to never leave us, all of which leads to the haunting and frightening idea that God, and all I believe about him, is make-believe. His abandonment, therefore, causes me to doubt his existence, which should be ironic because how could I have the sense of something that was non-existent leaving?

A conclusion to my thoughts may have been somewhat reached, and benefits of dark nights perceived, but the dawn has yet to break on the horizon. Perhaps I will be walking, going, and doing, and without realizing it find that his Presence has replaced Absence. It is a possibility. And the fact that I can state it as such may indicate the night is ending, but I do not know. Luther thought it helpful to drop the idea all together and ironically, in faith drop faith and let it take care of itself. But he also drank a lot, so, yeah.

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Sarah’s home is Oregon where she is the mother of two sons, the step-mother to three more, and the wife of David. Her writings are premeditated, accidental collisions of thought and words.